Bytes

Palm said last week that it is acquiring the assets and intellectual property of Be for $11m as it boosts its operating system to compete with the challenge from Microsoft's Pocket PC. The company also announced that Alan Kessler, general manager of the Palm division developing the operating system, has resigned. The division, which is scheduled to be separated from the hardware manufacturing side of the company, will be temporarily headed by Palm's chairman, Eric Benhamou.

Be has won praise in the past for its operating system, BeOS, which pioneered multi-tasking and processing multimedia. In the past the operating system has been made available to run on Apple computers, PCs and appliances such as MP3 players. Palm said that Be technology would help the Palm OS's support of internet and multimedia technologies in its core markets and also help to migrate the operating system into other areas.

The industry Standard, the magazine that chronicled the economics and politics of the hi-tech internet industries and became part of the dot.com culture it reported on, ceased publication last week and is looking for buyers. Funding problems, because of drying revenue streams from advertisers, and preparations for going public eating up cash reserves, were cited by the magazine's editor in chief, Jonathan Weber.

Lack of advertising saw the pagination shrink by 80 per cent from last year with revenue falling from $14.8m to $4.2m. Total revenues fell from $140m last year to a projected $40m this year. Staff lay-offs began at the beginning of this year. The Industry Standard launched a London-based European edition last October, only to shut it down in March.

BEENZ.COM is set to cease its online payment operations on Sunday. The company was founded in March 1988 by Charles Cohen to create a universal online currency as an alternative to existing national monetary units and "old economy" credit cards. The basic units, Beenz, could be earned, for instance, by visiting e-commerce sites, and then spent on products and services at participating sites. But last week the Beenz website warned that operations would cease on 26 August and that any unspent Beenz would not be honoured after that date. The London office will be closed, but the New York offices will remain open while the company's assets are disposed of.

A spokesman, David Vindel, said that several companies are negotiating for Beenz technology and intellectual property rights. Beenz had raised $80m in funding from investors, including the Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. Vindel said that the company was not in danger of bankruptcy."

Professor Edward Felton last week finally delivered a paper revealing the security flaws in anti-piracy technology developed by the music-industry backed Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). Felton, who with a team of researchers, cracked the copy-protection in a SDMI contest, planned to deliver the paper in April but did not after being warned by SDMI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) that he could be sued. After being accused of stifling academic freedom, the RIAA said it would not bring charges under a 1988 law banning discussion of circumventing copy-protection. Felton said he was happy finally to make his research public, but that the existing legislation constituted "a big cloud hanging over our continued research and we don't feel safe doing what we normally do".

Although the RIAA sent a letter to Felton telling him he was liable to prosecution if he went public with his research, it said it never intended to sue. However, last week it refused to rule out action against other academic research in the future. Privacy groups warn that many researchers in the US are not revealing their findings in the field of encryption technology, or are turning their attentions elsewhere, for fear of prosecution.

NEWS LAST week that AOL and Lotus were testing instant messaging (IM) interoperability between their systems failed to appease the providers of rival systems, who argue that all IM systems should communicate with each other in the same way that e-mail is universal across servers and systems.

The experiment between AOL's AIM and Lotus's Sametime was presented as the first trial at opening out AOL's proprietary and market-leading IM services after AOL told regulators that it would begin tests of IM interoperability. However, rivals such as Microsoft and Yahoo pointed out that users of these systems have been able to message one another for several years as long as accounts were held on both services and that the trial was merely aimed at eliminating the need for separate accounts, rather than addressing the central issue of AOL allowing interoperability with other leading IM systems. Jupiter Media analyst Billy Pidgeon said the trial "was not very significant in light of the debate over the issue."

Privacy groups last week filed an expanded complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission against Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, which is scheduled for release next month.

A 12-page addition to their original July complaint was delivered last week saying that the built-in Passport identity service allows Microsoft illegally to track and monitor internet users and, that, by including children in its service, the company directly violates new legislation aimed at protecting the privacy of children online.

Meanwhile, more changes to XP were announced, including widening its support for digital photography to make it easier to use software from Kodak and others.